European patent EP 1127337 describes an apparatus for shading 3-dimensional computer generated images, representing each object in the image by a set of flat polygons, in particular triangles. A vertex coordinate (x, y, z) is supplied for each vertex of the triangle. A triangle may be sent as part of a triangle strip, if not sent this way than by comparing the vertices against each other, the triangles can be converted to strips. A strip takes up less area of memory, as only n+2 vertices are required to store n triangles instead of 3n. Also only one pointer is then required to point to all the objects in the strip.
According to the method described in EP 1127337, for rendering the graphics data for a tile, all triangles of a strip that overlaps the tile are processed. For example, a triangle that is part of a triangle strip overlapping 50 tiles is processed 50 times, even if that triangle does only overlap a single tile.